Well it sure beats watching paint dry.
I was listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, when they did a feature on a Somerset Cheese maker who'd put a web cam up for a few months looking at a cheese maturing.
What I thought was brilliant was that this centuries old tradition was using present day marketing to great effect. (A 5 minute slot on the Today programme all about the brand? That'll do nicely.)
If they hadn't put a web cam up, if they didn't have a myspace page, (which I hasten to add they do, with hundreds of cheesy friends,) then this would have been a non-story.
The presenters of Today even gave out the url and invited listeners to go and look at the webcam.
As your humble reporter, I diligently did so, it was wonderfully low-fi and ever so slightly Monty Pythonish, but I noticed that 500,000 other visits to the site had already been racked up.
Yep. HALF A MILLION. To a Shepton Mallett cheese producer's web site.
My guess is that the figures will go even more stratospheric after the Today airing. (Not to mention the long tail benefits and indeed Google ranking effect, thanks to the BBC's links.)
But they might want to revisit their allocation of server capacity, in order to meet demand. After giving out the url on air today, the servers crashed.
Marvellous, name making stuff, and only possible methinks via Web 2.0 enthusiasms.
ps. On visiting the cheese site, I couldn't help but notice a striking resemblance to the TV set graphic the company my Missus works for, whitespace. I wonder if they could be related?
(Whitespace home page.)
UPDATE: I'm told by the Whitespacers that the image was sourced from iStockPhoto, which explains the co-incidental useage.
pps. The cheesecam reminded me affectionately of the Cambridge Coffee Cam many years ago.(But you're probably to young to remember that.)
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